Drawbridge, California
ghost town in the San Francisco Bay
Drawbridge (formerly Saline City) is a ghost town with an abandoned railroad station located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, next to Station Island, now a part of the city of Fremont, California, United States. It is located on the Union Pacific Railroad 6 miles (10 km) south of downtown Fremont, at an elevation of 7 feet (2 m). Formerly used as a hunting village, it has been a ghost town since 1975 and is slowly sinking into the marshlands. It is now part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge and is illegal to visit.
History
Drawbridge was created by the narrow-gauge South Pacific Coast Railroad on Station Island in 1876 and consisted of one small cabin for the operator of the railroad's two drawbridges crossing Mud Slough and Coyote Creek to connect Newark with Alviso and San Jose. At one time 10 passenger trains stopped there per day, five going north and five going south. The drawbridges were removed long ago. The only path leading into Drawbridge is the Union Pacific Railroad track.
In the 1880s, on weekends nearly 1,000 visitors flocked to the town. By the 1920s, although the town had no roads, it did have 90 buildings, and was divided into two neighborhoods: the predominantly Roman Catholic South Drawbridge, and the predominantly Protestant North Drawbridge.
“Drawbridge, California” enters the record as ghost town in the San Francisco Bay. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Drawbridge, California and ghost can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Drawbridge, California” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Drawbridge, California and ghost provides the most credible route into that argument.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5306017. Authority coordinates are 37.465, -121.974. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975 and 1876.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Drawbridge, California” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.